Should High School Students Get Paid?

High school students today deal with overloaded schedules, hours of homework, and heightened academic and extracurricular expectations. These demands leave students overstressed and with no time to themselves to relax or reflect. A typical day can find a student waking up at 6:30 to rush to school for a club meeting, followed by a typical school day, sports practice until 6:30, SAT prep class until 8:30, then home to eat dinner, shower, do homework, and finally fall into bed exhausted. High school students feel too much pressure to be overachievers and be involved in every extracurricular so that it will “look good” on their transcript. Trying to balance participation in extracurricular activities while preparing for SAT’s and college admissions decreases the time that students need to develop their own specific interests and mature. Thus, American high school students are less and less ready
The SAT weighs heavily on admissions decisions to colleges so students spend months extensively preparing for the tests, trying to fit studying in among all other activities and often going to late night review classes. The SAT was originally designed to predict the achievement of students in their freshman year of college, which explains the test’s importance in determining admissions. However, the test has been proven to be inaccurate at measuring how students will do freshman year, and additionally it has been proven to be very “coachable,” meaning that with enough studying almost anyone can get a good score regardless of intelligence (Elert). Since the SAT is “coachable,” many students stress themselves out and spend all available time preparing because with enough effort they know they can get a good score. The SAT’s cause extreme amounts of stress and students devote much time to them even though the results have been proven to be essentially